An international team of researchers coordinated by the University of Trieste has discovered a new species of Antarctic shrimp – the Orchomenella rinamontiae – a crustacean belonging to the order of amphipods, identified in the vicinity of the Mario Zucchelli Italian Antarctic Station by Piero Giulianini, zoologist and professor at the University of Trieste’s Department of Life Sciences, during the 33rd Italian Antarctic Expedition in Terra Nova Bay.

The event opens up new avenues for research and represents a significant step forward for a deeper understanding of marine life and biodiversity in the most remote and inhospitable regions of the planet: knowledge of Antarctic marine communities and the species that make them up is, in fact, of fundamental importance for monitoring global changes due to human activities.

‘The initial aim of the research was to verify the responses of an Antarctic shrimp species to warming seas. However, morphological and genetic analyses revealed that some of the samples belonged to a previously undescribed species,’ explains Piero Giulianini, zoologist and professor of the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Trieste. ‘The new species belongs to a dominant and endemic group in Antarctic waters, scavenger shrimps that play a key role in marine communities, consuming and dispersing food of all sizes. Like a litmus test, monitoring the abundance and diversity of these shrimps will allow us to understand the ongoing anthropogenic impacts on these delicate ecosystems: human impact on the environment, in fact, negatively affects marine communities, hampering their diversity and complexity. But not only that, in our laboratories we will also conduct analyses to study how the newly identified species responds to ocean warming,’ the professor concludes.

For the morphological analysis, the researchers used an innovative and advanced imaging technique, X-ray microtomography, which allowed them to obtain high-resolution three-dimensional images of the new species, offering the advantage of digitally examining the sample without introducing artefacts and distortions due to manipulation.

The discovery not only enriches the catalogue of Antarctic marine species, but also underlines the importance of combining physical and genetic analyses for species classification, through technologically advanced tools such as microtomography, which could revolutionise the way biological samples are studied and classified. As image resolution continues to improve and equipment costs decrease, microtomography could soon become a standard technique in biodiversity research, greatly accelerating the process of species discovery, description and classification.

The name chosen to describe the new shrimp, Orchomenella rinamontiae, is a tribute by the research group to the zoologist Rina Monti, who in 1907 became the first Italian woman to hold a professorship at the University of Sassari, and celebrates her pioneering contribution to zoology in academia.

The study involved the Applied Zoology and Applied Genomics research groups of the University of Trieste (Piero Giulianini, Samuele Greco, Elisa D’Agostino, Marco Gerdol, Alberto Pallavicini, Chiara Manfrin) with the contribution of two experts in the field of Antarctic shrimp classification: Claude de Broyer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and Ed Hendrycks of the Canadian Museum of Nature. A physicist and a zoologist from the University of Calabria (Sandro Donato and Anita Giglio) participated in the analysis of X-ray microtomography data performed at Sincrotrone Elettra in Trieste.

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Full study published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society   
‘A new Antarctic species of Orchomenella G.O. Sars, 1890 (Amphipoda: Lysianassoidea: Tryphosidae): is phase-contrast micro-tomography a mature technique for digital holotypes?’

Piero G. Giulianini1, Claude De Broyer2, Ed A. Hendrycks3, Samuele Greco1, Elisa D’Agostino1, Sandro Donato4,5,6, Anita Giglio7, Marco Gerdol1, Alberto Pallavicini1, Chiara Manfrin1

1Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
2Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Bruxelles, Belgium
3Canadian Museum of Nature, Research and Collections, Ottawa, Canada
4Department of Physics, University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy
5Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Division of Frascati, Frascati, Rome, Italy
6Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste SCpA, in AREA Science Park, Basovizza, Trieste, Italy
7Department of Biology, Ecology and Earth Science, University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy